Education was not something the Ross family regarded as alien or imposed — it was something they had pursued, fought for, institutionalized, and protected across generations.

When Mary Ross was born, the family lived in Park Hill, and the world she grew up in was the world the Cherokee Nation had built in Oklahoma: a world that had survived catastrophic loss and that continued to maintain, against considerable pressure, its own educational institutions, its own governmental structures, its own sense of collective identity.

She attended school in the Cherokee tradition — first at a local school, later at the Cherokee Female Seminary, which had by then been reorganized as Northeastern State Teachers College.

She excelled in mathematics.